"Over the last twenty years, cultural exception and cultural diversity are at the core of an even more globalized debate on the balance between trade and culture. In 1993, during the GATT international negotiations, cultural exception is seen as an appropriate term for certain actors in order to protect the legitimacy of cultural policies and to withdraw the cultural products and services from the GATT agenda. Twelve years after, the Member States of UNESCO adopt the Convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions, meant to be a mechanism of international regulation on the "trade-culture" interface. Norms and normative issues have been central to the study of international relations for at least two decades. The major issue of this thesis deals with the process of the emergence of international normative frames, the dynamics of their construction, as well as the factors of the international norms production. As a result, we seek to analyze the sequences of the construction of the normative frame in relation to the "trade-culture" interface and to attempt a temporal study in order to find the norm building mechanisms and to explore the complexity of its elaboration. We claim opening the black box of the building process and opting for an international political sociology analysis. Our scope is to observe closely the actors, their strategies, their interactions, as well as their constraints along the process of the construction of the normative frame."

The complete text is available on the website of CCSD (Centre pour la communication scientifique directe).